Showing posts with label Research. Show all posts

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Indian Scientists Discovers Remnants Of Youngest Supernova

PUNE: Scientists of the Pune-based National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) and Indian Centre for Space Physics (ICSP), Kolkata, have discovered one of the youngest supernova remnants in the Milky Way. The phenomenon of a star exploding to its death is called supernova.

In the latest discovery, the scientists concluded from the size of the remnants that the supernova occurred only a few hundred years ago, making it one of the youngest known supernova remnants. The study was published in the September issue of The Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society.

The scientists — Subhasis Roy of NCRA and Sabyasachi Pal from ICSP — used the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) facility at Khodad, about 80 km from Pune, for this study, which took them a decade.

The discovery is significant as search for supernova remnants is a topic of great interest the world over. Only 270 of an estimated 1,000 supernovas have been discovered so far. Scientists have also said that in 400 years, about a dozen supernovas would have taken place, but only two have been discovered till date.

The scientists spotted the supernova remnants in the centre of the Earth's galaxy. They said it was a challenge to spot the supernova remnants because of its size. Pal said, "The supernova remnants we discovered were small in size, but the radio telescopes in GMRT made it possible for us to conduct the study effectively."

The scientists have not been able to find the exact number of years when the supernova remnants wer created as its distance from Earth is not known. Pal said, "We are still working on finding the exact distance of the supernova remnants from Earth. Once we find this, we will be able to tell the exact age." ...

Source: Times Of India
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Saturday, September 28, 2013

Mumbai Youth, The Most Susceptible to Heart Diseases - A Survey

In a three-year-long study conducted in 12 cities across India, it has been found that 51 per cent of Mumbaikars have low levels of the heart-protecting high-density lipoprotein (HDL), also known as ‘good’ cholesterol. The study has also revealed that over 70 per cent of the urban Indian population is at the risk of being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.

The Saffola Life study covered more than 1.86 lakh people between the ages of 30 and 100. “A sedentary lifestyle, in addition to stressful work conditions and a compromised diet are leading factors in precipitating heart disease risk. This has affected the heart health of people between the ages of 30 and 44,” said Dr Akshay Mehta, senior cardiologist, Asian Heart Hospital.

Of the 29,017 Mumbaikars who participated in the study, 44 per cent reported that they consume preserved or processed foods at least twice a week, and 42 per cent said that they eat fried foods at least twice a week. Additionally, 71 per cent of them were guilty of consuming two or less servings of fibre-rich whole grains in their diet.

“Now it is fairly common to see youth suffering from heart strokes. Five years ago, we hardly saw young patients with heart problems. Now, we get many cases where cardiovascular disease affects people in the age group of 25 to 35,” said Dr Ajay Chaurasia, head of cardiology department, BYL Nair Hospital.

The study also revealed that at 12 per cent, Mumbai was one of the cities with the least number of respondents with diabetes, which experts see as a good sign. The study also showed that Mumbaikars are keen on keeping themselves fit, with a substantial 64 per cent of respondents agreeing that they exercise thrice a week or less.

Shared From DNA India

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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Too Much Time On Social Media Results In Short Term Memory Loss - A Study

Always online? Take a break!People who spend too much time browsing social media could be squandering their memories or losing important information, a new study has warned.

Contrary to common wisdom, an idle brain is in fact doing important work - and in the age of constant information overload, it's a good idea to go offline on a regular basis, according to a researcher from Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Erik Fransen, whose research focuses on short-term memory and ways to treat diseased neurons, said that a brain exposed to a typical session of social media browsing can easily become hobbled by information overload.

The result is that less information gets filed away in your memory.

The problem begins in a system of the brain commonly known as the working memory, or what most people know as short-term memory. That's the system of the brain that we need when we communicate, Fransen said.

"Working memory enables us to filter out information and find what we need in the communication. It enables us to work online and store what we find online, but it's also a limited resource," he said.

"At any given time, the working memory can carry up to three or four items. When we attempt to stuff more information in the working memory, our capacity for processing information begins to fail.

"When you are on Facebook, you are making it harder to keep the things that are 'online' in your brain that you need. "In fact, when you try to process sensory information like speech or video, you are going to need partly the same system of working memory, so you are reducing your own working memory capacity.

"And when you try to store many things in your working memory, you get less good at processing information," he said.

You're also robbing the brain of time it needs to do some necessary housekeeping. The brain is designed for both activity and relaxation, Fransen said.

"The brain is made to go into a less active state, which we might think is wasteful; but probably memory consolidation, and transferring information into memory takes place in this state. Theories of how memory works explain why these two different states are needed.

"When we max out our active states with technology equipment, just because we can, we remove from the brain part of the processing, and it can't work," Fransen said.

Shared From Indian Express

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Monday, September 9, 2013

Skip Sleep and You Miss The Chance To Hit Save - Says Research

We spend about one-third of our lives sleeping, but much of that function remains a mystery. Weekend Edition Sunday is asking some pretty fundamental, yet complicated, questions about why we do it and why we can't seem to get more of it.

Dr. Matthew Walker says the question of why we sleep remains "that archetypal mystery."

Walker, the principal investigator at the sleep lab the University of California, Berkeley, works with patients who suffer from sleep abnormalities. He says the complexity of sleep makes the research that much more fascinating.

"There have been so many great discoveries within science based on the revolution of sort of genetics and molecular biology, and sleep remains resistant to all of that in terms of an answer," he tells Weekend Edition host Rachel Martin.

Walker says there have been several critical discoveries, however, illuminating how sleep helps us learn and retain information. Researchers are also taking note of the negative side effects of not getting enough sleep.

Research on learning suggests "sleep is critical at almost all stages of memory formation, memory processing and long-term memory retention," he says.

Science also backs up historical anecdotes about how sleep fosters creativity.

"There seems to be some type of memory processing that's creative that starts to take pieces of information that we've learned recently and starts trying to test the connections between that recent information and all of the information you've got stored in your brain," he says. "So it's almost like memory pinball — you're bouncing that information around, you're testing which connections to build."

So what happens if you don't sleep? "A whole constellation of different brain and body functions start to deteriorate," he says. Our brains are less effective at absorbing new information without sleep. Plus, our ability to retain recently learned information is impaired, and "you lose the chance to essentially hit the save button on that information."

Aside from memorization, sleep deprivation makes it harder for the brain to regulate emotions.

From an evolutionary perspective, sleep doesn't seem like a good idea: survival instincts are on hold. But Walker says the fact that sleep has stuck around so long shows its biological importance.

"Sleep serves so many wonderful, beneficial functions that far outweigh those potential downsides to it," he says.

Shared From NPR